Keyword searches performed by users of search engines result in web pages, known as “search engine results pages” or SERPs, that include unpaid search listings, commonly referred to as “organic” search results, as well as paid search listings. Individuals skilled in the creation, updating, and optimization of web pages, referred to herein as “webmasters”, can improve the placement of web pages in SERPS. Actions or methods that seek to obtain better positions among unpaid search listings are referred to as “search engine optimization” or simply SEO. SEO is typically targeted at the most popular search engines which currently include Google search, Microsoft Bing, and Yahoo!.
When a visitor, also referred to as a “user”, clicks on a SERP listing, his/her browser is directed to a corresponding web page. The rate or percentage of time that a user clicks on a specific listing when presented with a search results page that includes the listing is referred to as a click through rate (CTR). Data published by companies that provide search engines shows that with few exceptions CTR improves monotonically as the position of a listing improves within a SERP. Thus, the first, or highest position on the search results page has the highest CTR and the lowest position on the page has the lowest CTR for all organic search results listings on the page. Accordingly, the goal of SEO is to improve the ranking or position of domains or web pages of interest in SERPs.
One approach to improving the position, or ranking, of a web page within a SERP is to adjust the content of the web page to better correspond to specific keyword searches. However, since webmasters often manage large numbers of web pages and large numbers of keywords it may be burdensome to assign or map individual keywords to web pages and then modify the content of the web pages accordingly. Thus, automated SEO tools that map keywords to web pages and that generate a list of instructions or tasks to modify the web pages so as to optimize the web pages for the mapped keywords are desirable.